The Oscar nominations were revealed yesterday by the president of the Academy Frank Pierson and Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody.
While reading through the list of nominees, I was reminded of one real truth--Oscar can give and Oscar can take away.
Case in point: Paul Giamatti (Sideways) who gave us one of the most entertaining performances of the year, was not nominated for Best Actor, an absence that dumbfounds me. His self-loathing, depressed middle-aged white male in search of the next glass of wine was amazing because Giamatti took it past the level of slap-stick routine to an internalized reality. If we saw him on the street, we'd not think of him as Giamatti but as Miles and we'd throw our arms around him and tell him not to worry about his book being rejected. The power of his performance rests not on how his comedic antics roused the belly-laughter out of us but that we empathized with him. Oscar really screwed Lassie on this one.
You ask how? Consider this: Prior to the nominations, CNN online tracked the points for all of the likely actors to be nominated for all acting categories. For the Best Actor category, Giamatti nearly doubled the points of the second actor in his category. (Points were based off of all the nominations and wins received from critics awards. Giamatti had wins for Best Actor from Toronto Film Critics, San Francisco Film Critics, Online Film Critics, and Dallas-Fortworth Film Critics. He had nominations from the Golden Globes, Screen Actor's Guild, Independent Spirit Awards, Golden Satellite, Broadcast Film Critics, and Boston Society of Film Critics.)
In other words, Giamatti's chances were as seemingly set in stone as Moses' Ten Commandments.
But Oscar has his favorites. He has his flavors of the year. Giamatti, unfortunately, is not one of them. (He failed to win a nomination for his acclaimed performance in American Splendor last year.) And this is a travesty.
Martin Scorsese for Best Director
Call it Oscar mojo. You know when you have it. If you are Martin Scorsese, you know when you don't. But times they are changing.
With 11 nominations it looks as if Martin Scorsese might finally win himself a Best Picture and/or Director award. Let me parade before your eyes the names of his films that have been nominated but have failed to win and you will understand what a huge deal it would be for his name to be printed on the innards of that gold envelope: Taxi Driver (1977), Raging Bull (1981), The Last Temptation of Christ (1989), GoodFellas (1991), The Age of Innocence (1994), and Gangs of New York (2003).
Last year, I swear that whenever they showed Scorsese in the audience, he was somewhere in the farthest reaches of the auditorium under the balcony, looking brooding and bored. I don't blame him. Seeing him at these moments reminded me of another truism of the Oscar's: If you are considered a front-runner, if you are "someone" in Hollywood, you sit in walking distance of the stage. If your not a front-runner, your seat is so far away that you might as well be standing in the cloak room or out with the paparazzi and Joan Rivers, listening to her drivel on about the next part of her facial anatomy that’s becoming Tupperware.
I bet you this year Scorsese is sitting nearly front and center, as he should be.
